With Every Breath I Take I Become More Inflated
by Connie Nervegas
Summary: The turtles and friends are characters in their own soap opera. They battle marriage, birth, death and spontaneous resurrection.


_I wrote a bunch of soap opera spoofs as a teenager (okay, as an adult) and I've decided to borrow from them to make a turtle soap spoof. I could add silly sequels to this too. This is a challenge from Stealthy Stories. Because they watch soap operas in different incarnations, the challenge is to write them into a soap opera or about the soap they're watching. I decided to write them into a soap. The idea is to imitate the bizarre writing style of a Soap Opera Digest article where they sum up the life story of a character in about a paragraph and mention about eight names in one sentence. I've watched soaps my whole life and most of the situations I mention are real soap storylines. Except Diablo. I'm moving them all to a small New England town because that's where most soaps are set. Just a lot of silliness._

Splinter Hamato was the patriarch of Chelonia, New York, a small and quiet village settled along the mafia controlled ocean front. The executive for the show wanted to set it in New York City, but the head writer overruled him. A soap opera must always be set in a small community or else the characters could just stop talking to people they didn't like and find new friends.

Splinter owned RAT Corp., a company that made some kind of electronic thing, although nobody was quite sure what exactly the thing was. Mostly he stood around in the living room of his mansion in a designer suit, mixing drinks in his living room, bartering stock proxies back and forth with his relatives.

His oldest son Leonardo was pegged to take on the family business after Splinter died or else got too old for the role and was replaced with a younger actor. Leonardo had recently been recast with a retired underwear model after the eight year old who played him got a part in a sitcom. Leonardo was addicted to pain killers when he bravely battled shell rot and after his miraculous recovery he spent most of his time popping pills and swilling it down with whiskey.

Master Splinter's wife Alex hated Leo with a passion and that was because she wanted his proxies of RAT stock. Leo and Alex were secretly sleeping together, or so they thought. Little did they know that the wall between their bedroom and Leo's half brother Michelangelo was nothing but cardboard, painted to look like plaster and hadn't noticed it wobbling every time someone shut a door.

Splinter had had an affair with a voodoo priestess when he visited New Orleans to pay an assassin to shoot his business partner and later that year found Mikey in a basket with a jar full of beetles that had been rubbed against a black cat under the light of a full moon along with a note telling him that she couldn't take care of their son because she was dead. Splinter didn't question this logic and took him in. He didn't notice that his son was a turtle and proudly bragged to all his yes-men that his new baby looked exactly like him.

Mikey knew of Alex's scheme. He had heard her moaning, "Leo, give me your proxies," in the next room enough times to know what she wanted. So Mikey told Splinter, who refused to believe him and sent him out of the house. He walked down the street and told a bar tender that he was homeless. The bartender instantly handed him a room key and told him that he now had a convenient job opening and convenient apartment over the bar. He became a pool hustler and lived on the seedier side of life for a few months before the writers got tired of it and sent him back to the mansion.

Splinter had one other son named Donatello. He had just been hired because the executive wanted to fire Mikey because the actor kept getting DUIs. So Mikey hit a tree and died.

As Mikey lay there in the Plastic Tree Forest, bleeding to death from the one tiny scratch on his forehead that the censors would allow, he was visited by the ghost of his long dead mother, Queen Marie, who told him that he would not die, but his spirit would be implanted into his evil brother Don.

Don had only been in three scenes since his arrival in town and the news that he was evil was new to the audience. All he'd done so far was stand around, staring back and forth at his new family members, slack jawed. So in the next scene, he suddenly went insane, threatening to stab Leo with a letter opener for no reason.

So Mikey's spirit took over Don's body and the actor playing Don was eventually converted over to Mikey because Don's soul was so evil that he didn't deserve to exist. They all called him Mikey, he acted like Mikey, but he looked like Don. And so the actor had been metaphysically replaced.

But the audience wouldn't stand for this. What about his epic romance with Becky Malevolent? Mikey and Becky had fought against all odds to be together. Even after he accidentally murdered her with a steam shovel, their love was still true and pure. So the new Mikey fell in love with Becky. But this wasn't enough for the audience. They wanted the old Mikey back.

After he got out of rehab, he came back to the show as Don. Don's evil spirit had somehow taken over Mikey's body as he'd lain on the side of the road. He hadn't been truly dead after all because the cops in Chelonia didn't really know how to check for a pulse.

So now old Mikey was Don. He went back to the Hamato family mansion and cruelly informed his father that Leo and Alex were having an affair. Splinter wasn't terribly surprised. Alex was a nymphomaniac and he was glad to get her off of him sometimes and pass her off to some unsuspecting sucker.

But then Alex announced that she was pregnant and the baby was most likely Leo's. Mikey was horrified. He was now in Don's body and Don was Splinter and Alex's son. He knew this was inbreeding in some way, but he would have to draw a flow chart later to figure out how.

Splinter threw Alex out of his house. She abandoned the family and moved back home to live with her family on the Mothership plantation in Georgia, promising to send the baby Federal Express back to Leo as soon as it was born.

Just then, Raphael Luciferson road into town on his Harley. The executive realized that although Leo was a pretty boy, his character was too much of a basket case now to get a real female fan following and so they hired a new hunk to take his spot. Raph was pretty unhappy when he realized that there were no women in the cast.

A slew of ex underwear models were hired to rectify this. Becky was still in town and left Don or Mikey or whoever she was with when she saw Raph beating up a homeless guy. She was immediately in love and they moved into an abandoned garret because drifters on bikes always seem to find enough money to rent a fancy apartment to do their laying.

Rebecca Bedlam-Saddlebag, a lunatic escaped from the show occupying the follow timeslot, moved into town and found Leo waiting outside the hospital for his weekly methadone treatment. She was on the run from the cops and needed an alibi. So she married Leo on the spot.

Mikey was womanless and decided to remember that he had a teaching degree and was hired the next day to teach at the local high school. There he met Katie Malevolent, a sixteen year old student and they started a controversial affair that got him nominated for a Daytime Emmy. He didn't remember his ex-girlfriend's name outside of a week and it took him six months to realize that Katie was really Becky's sister. Then Katie told him that she was pregnant and the baby could be either his or Ford Gingivitis'. He was the gym teacher. Mikey gave a few three page long speeches and smashed shot glasses against mirrors for a few days.

Then Leo and Alex's baby arrived in the mail. It was a girl named Emily Mothership. Leo put her upstairs and she wasn't seen again until she was five years old because the show couldn't afford to keep her on contract.

Then Raph rode his motorcycle into the front room of the Hamato family mansion and announced that he was Splinter's long lost son with Maria the Flamenco dancer. She had sold him to a kind man with horns and red glowing eyes named Diablo Luciferson who had raised him to hate his real father. Splinter immediately gave Raph all of Leo's proxies and decided to turn him into a real Hamato.

The audience tired of Raph and Becky as a couple quickly and he soon moved on to Maya Gingivitis, Ford's sister. She flew into town on a broomstick. The executive decided to profit on Harry Potter and make a character into a witch.

Then Leo made his move. He announced that he was clean from his pill addiction and stole all of Raph's proxies back while he was busy rolling around with Maya in a hayloft, gazing sensitively in her eyes.

But Leo's carefully laid plan of family domination was sidetracked when his high school sweetheart Karai came back into town. Sweetheart was an overstatement. Karai had shot Leo when he slept with her sister who turned out to be her mother and then she had hit him with her car when he told her he was gay.

She had been pregnant when she left the show three years earlier and now returned holding his newborn child. She had named it Saki, after her favorite alcoholic beverage. Leo helpfully pointed out the misspelling.

The audience loved Leo and Karai's love-hate relationship. When Karai had left the show to do shoe commercials, his character lost all of its popularity and the writers realized that the actor could do nothing but stand around looking good and make out with pretty actresses. So they lobbied Karai to come back to the show. Karai promised to raise the baby to hate Leo and then Rebecca stabbed Karai with twelve upholstery pins when she got back from a routine electroshock therapy session.

Katie's father came to town after he realized that it was a mistake to leave town and let his sixteen year old daughter shack up with her twenty five year old teacher. Tyrone the Malevolent flew into town and followed Mikey around, rubbing his hands together and cackling.

Don threatened to leave the show if he didn't get laid soon and so he had a one night stand with his secretary April O'Neil. Nobody knew what Don did for a living or why it required the use of a secretary, but he had an office set and so the audience was satisfied.

Rebecca had a baby during a RAT Corp. board meeting on top of the conference table and named it Neo Hamato. She was fired as the head of the Human Resources Department for delivering the CEO's grandchild during a board meeting.

Raph decided to get a job when he ran out of money to buy romantic dinners and condoms and decided to set up shop as a fashion designer. It gave him a good excuse to feel up women during fittings for fashion shows. As soon as he announced that he needed a secretary, Mindy Ramshackle, a mysterious woman without a past, materialized in the doorway and told him that she typed 80 wpm and was Certiport certified in Microsoft Word. He hired her on the spot.

Don married April because the actor who played Don needed time off to go the Betty Ford Clinic and after they came back from the honeymoon Splinter told them that they were brother and sister and that April was his daughter with an Amish woman he had dated in high school. He reckoned he should have moved "Tell Don and April about incestuous relationship" to number three on his daily to-do list. So Don and April broke up and she dated Casey Saddlebag, Rebecca's ex-husband. Casey and Rebecca had gone on a murderous rampage as a honeymoon trip together and April wondered if she could ever live up to that kind of intimacy.

Katie and Becky were taking a peaceful drive together, both nine months pregnant, during the worst blizzard of the century. The car washed down a ravine and they swam up an icy river, climbed across a rotten log and swung on a vine to reach the Hamato family cabin in the woods. They gave birth to each other's babies at the same time and then they both passed out.

Leo arrived at the cabin, planning to have an acid flashback to the days he was held in a Mexican prison with no toilet seats and was forced to eat pinto beans at every meal, but instead he found Katie and Becky, both passed out and wearing remarkably sexy negligees for women who had just given birth.

The babies were nowhere to be found. Katie had accidentally put Becky's baby outside with the trash and Katie's baby had blow out the window. So Leo carried them both single handedly down the mountain and through The Plastic Tree Forest and then to the hospital.

Mikey found Becky's baby in his garbage can and decided to raise him as his own, which was strange because Mikey had just been elected Police Commissioner and apparently they never got to "What to do with abandoned babies" in police commissioner school.

A woman named Robyn replaced April as Don's secretary and had a flirtation with Don that resulted in a stormy sexual relationship, until she told him that she and April were twins.

Don died of embarrassment when he realized the he had been married twelve times and slept with two of sisters.

Meanwhile, the show struggled to cast its sixteenth adult Leo.

Raph remembered that Mindy was his ex-wife after about two months and then, in a fit of despair, Mindy rode off a cliff on Raph's motorcycle in her wedding dress. Raph arrived at the set just in time to scream, "No!" They searched for five minutes and pronounced her dead.

Mikey found Katie's baby on the doorstep of the police station and decided to name the babies Yin and Yang.

Tyrone the Malevolent had purchased the old abandoned castle Wind Bag Manor on the outskirts of town and set up his lair of evil. It was located on Fork Island, located just out of shot of the camera. All of the characters stood on the dock every day, looking at Fork Island because there was nothing else to do in Chelonia. Tyrone decided to finally take out his revenge against the Hamato family and came up with a plan to extort millions of dollars from Splinter with his evil weather machine. He's bought it at a flea market. Tyrone set the weather machine and set it to a very humid setting and tortured all the characters with frizzy hair. This worked well because the Cosmetologists of American Television were on strike.

Raph, Ford and Casey stormed Tyrone's Wind Bag Manor and tried to destroy the weather machine. Casey had been on an extended leave of absence because he needed to have his pectoral implants removed and now needed to be reestablished in the minds of the audience. Ford was shot and killed as he banged on the device with his shoe. Raph saved himself and Casey and married Maya as a reward.

But Maya discovered that Mindy had been secretly measuring Raph's inseams in his office before she jumped of the cliff and Maya cast a spell on him to make sure that his toenails were ingrown for all of eternity.

Then the executive panicked because he noticed that they had gone way over budget that year and decided that they needed to get rid of a few actors.

Mikey came down with a brain tumor and started imagining his dead mother all over the place. The "fire actors" plan backfired because the writers rebelled and introduced a new character for every one they were forced to kill. As Mikey went nuts, blacking out and psychotically declaring himself king of the universe while he danced around Raph's fashion studio with a colander on his head, his mother's angel pleaded with Splinter in his dreams to get Mikey to a certain doctor in Los Angeles. So Splinter mercifully karate chopped Mikey into submission and flew him to L.A. But the plane crashed on the way and both Splinter and Mikey were presumed dead.

It turned out that Leo's mother Abi Scumbucket had somehow tampered with the plane. She had taken the Tampering with Airplanes course at her local community college. She arrived in town to find Leo now shacking up with Karai and their child. Emily was out back in the shed someplace with the old garden tools. Abi declared herself the CEO of RAT Corp. and told Leo that he would obey her orders.

Leo didn't like being ordered around. It was his turn to stand around uselessly in the Hamato mansion, giving orders to people who never listened. So he did the only reasonable thing and dug a deep pit in the woods and threw Abi in. He came back every day or so to give long speeches about how she never hugged him as a child and that he wished he could have had his own room growing up as he lowered her a bucket of bread and water.

Upon Mikey's demise, they realized that he had two babies living in his house with him and neither was his. They were both too ugly. The DNA test revealed that they both belonged to Leo. So Becky took her baby and declared that Leo would never have anything to do with her or Katie's babies again. She got into a car and pretended to drive out of town with Yin and Yang wearing a big purple and wig and Groucho glasses as a subtle disguise. She came back to town three days later when she realized that nobody cared enough to follow her.

Raph was rather put off when he found out that his wife's baby had been fathered by his own brother and so Raph shot Leo in the middle of the hospital. Seemed more convenient to shoot him there instead of taking him someplace private, shooting him and then becoming full of rage and remorse and dragging him into the hospital.

Don decided to come back to life to keep Raph from shooting Leo again and found out that Becky had paid a lab tech to switch the DNA results to make it look like the baby was really Leo's when it was really Raph's. She knew that Leo was the new CEO of RAT Corp. and wanted to cash in. Don had been given the gift of medical knowledge by the writers. It turned out that he'd majored in pre-med and that was enough to make him a doctor in Chelonia. So he became Chief of Staff the next day.

Rebecca married Raph when they both realized they were both the same amount of crazy. They had a son named Gaph.

Leo married Karai after Rebecca left him for his brother and was he mysteriously found dead two days later and Karai was made CEO of RAT Corp. The other board members found it slightly suspicious that she held the first board meeting in the cemetery and danced on his grave during the opening remarks.

The show was renewed for another season with threats to cancel if more of the actors didn't get naked more often. Stay tuned.


End file.
